18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic)

Simon moved stealthily towards the safe.

His eyes had the cat's trick of adjusting themselves instantly to darkness, and he had the same feline gift of noiseless movement without effort. He crossed the room until he could feel the safe looming in front of him. He put out his hand and touched it delicately with the tips of his fingers, holding his breath while he did so. The silence was still unbroken. His finger tips slithered down over the smooth surface until they found the handle and shaped themselves around it, With a sudden summoning of his resolution, he tight­ened his fingers and grasped it firmly.

The siren remained mute.

'Where are you?'

Christine's question reached him in a frightened breath as he crouched down in front of the safe door. Simon answered quietly but in his natural voice: 'Here.'

He put out his hand and touched her as she searched for him and guided her down to his side. His right hand was already turning the knob of the combination, 'What are you doing?'

Her voice was still unsteady.

'Opening the safe,' he said practically.

'Can you wait for that?'

'Lady,' said the Saint firmly, 'when I last looked inside this tin can it was bulging with a collection of jools that made me feel giddy to look at. I don't say they're worth quite as much as your lottery ticket, but they wouldn't come far behind it. I can always wait for a box of boodle like that.'

'But Graner will be coming --'

'Not yet-I hope. After all, they left me tied up, and they didn't know I had a knife. The first thing they ought to think of is that the fuse blew out by itself. They'll try to repair it, which ought to keep them out of mischief for a bit. It won't do them any good, because as soon as they put a new fuse in it'll blow out again. Then they may start to smell a rat and wonder how we're getting on. But not until . . . Now be a good girl and keep quiet for a minute while I give my celebrated imitation of a burglar.'

His ear was pressed against the chill steel, listen­ing for the click of the tumblers; his sensitive fingers twirled the dial backwards and forwards, fraction by fraction, probing the secrets of the lock like a physiologist finding his way through an exquisitely fine dissection. To Christine, the quiet and unflurried patience without which his manipulations would have had no posssibility of success must have been maddening. He was aware that she was shivering with the effort of crushing down the natural wild instincts of panic. His own nerves were drawn nearly to snapping point, and the haunting fear that the fuse diversion might not keep Graner and company occupied as long as he had hoped was never out of his mind; but he held himself with an iron self-control.

Christine's breath came more quickly as the irregu­lar faint ticking of the lock pecked dustily away at the roots of her nerves like erratically falling drops of water in a refined Chinese torture. There was no other sound to relieve the fearful silence of the room-only that bafflingly syncopated tick-tick-tick of the lock, the rhythm of her own breathing and the pounding of her own heart, and the occasional rustle of the Saint's clothes as he changed his position. The minutes dragged on and on, an interminable rosary of remorse­less time. ...

After a while the ache of nervous tension numbed her into a kind of stupor, from which she roused again to a sharper sense of intolerable torment.

She caught at his arm.

'Please!' she implored him incoherently. 'Please . . . please ...'

He laughed.

'I'm doing my best, sweetheart. Give me a chance.'

'You must have been half an hour already.'

'Sixteen minutes by my watch,' he said cheerfully, 'Hold on for a little longer and it 'll all be over. You ought to be enjoying yourself. This is a demonstration of painless safe-opening by the greatest expert in the world, and I know dozens of people who'd give their back teeth to be sitting where you are.'

His voice was gay and unruffled, with a magnetic confidence in it that somehow made the ordeal seem trivial. It made her feel as if she could almost see his face again in the dark, the face that was like no other face that she had ever seen in her life, which she could never have forgotten even if she had never seen it again after that first time when he took off his hat in the Plaza de la Republica to let her see it. The vision was as clear now as if she were looking at it. She could see it with the blithe cavalier lines poised on the outer brink of seriousness, the blue eyes intent, the keen lips absent-mindedly playing with a smile; and again she felt the strange spell which he had the power to cast.

'I'm sorry,' she said.

'Don't worry. Just think what fun Reuben and the rest of them are having hunting for candles.'

'Do you think they've got the ticket?'

'I should think so-unless the dogs chewed it along with Lauber. Be quiet again, darling-I think something's going to happen.'

Perhaps another five minutes went by. They might have been five hours, for the time they seemed to take out of her life.

And then the Saint sighed with profound delight; and she heard a more ponderous and solid noise from where he was working beside her.

'Got it!' he said, and his voice was sparkling with exultation. 'Stand clear of the gates, madam-we're opening the lucky dip!'

The heavy steel door brushed against her as he pushed it back.

He felt in his pocket and found his pencil flashlight. Its bright slender beam stabbed into the open safe, stroked